Rotund Rebound's launch week is coming to a close, meaning it's the last day to grab it with the 20% launch discount! It won't go that low again for a while, so hop on it! ;)

Well, [strike]today's[/strike] yesterday was the day. Rotund Rebound has officially launched! A storm knocked our internet out for all of yesterday (because life) When we decided to return to game development in 2017, we wanted to make a grand title with no corners cut, something worthy of standing alongside other famous and beloved titles. As we said in our return post, "Our prime interest as developers has always been to create the kind of game we can passionately pour our hearts, souls, blood, sweat and tears into and then confidently inform even the harshest critic that they need to experience it." Rotund Rebound has become that title. It's taken a combined 15,000+ hours from the two of us and given more than a few gray hairs in return, but we're very proud of this game. Sadly, throughout this journey we have learned that our niche genre and many of what we consider the game's strongest features, combine into a product with very limited appeal in today's market. That being so, if you're at all interested in this game, we'd be ever so grateful if you would get it now during its 20%-off launch week, and leave us an honest review. It doesn't have to be positive, but it turns out that if you don't hit 10 legit-purchase reviews, it will be assumed that you're shovelware and you'll get buried (more on that here). This request isn't about profit or our future in game development, but simply helping Rotund Rebound achieve its purpose. A game doesn't live unless it's played, and Rotund Rebound is an experience that deserves to live. Games brought us so much joy growing up, even shaping our lives and who we are as people, and that's what game dev has always been about for us: giving back that same experience to others. Anyway, that's enough out of us! Whether you want Rotund Rebound now, later, or never, it's finally available. Thanks for sticking with us and we hope with all our heart that you enjoy it. :)

Once again it's been a while, but at last the big day is nearly here! After months of final testing, tweaking, localizations, and storefront preparations, we're excited to announce that Rotund Rebound is releasing April 1st! No fooling! Check out the new trailer! [previewyoutube=vWtkMBoqF_E;leftthumb]https://youtu.be/vWtkMBoqF_E[/previewyoutube] We'd hoped we might manage a March 12th release in alignment with Dahku's 10th anniversary (time flies!) but big games take big time to do things properly. Regardless, after 4+ years it feels great to finally be bringing an end to our epic adventure of development, knowing players can soon begin their own epic adventures with the game! The price is $19.99, but launch week buyers get a 20% discount. :) Please look forward to it!

Last update we mentioned that Rotund Rebound was in the beta testing phase, giving players the chance to try it out at 99% completion. This has gone really well! In the past 10 weeks or so we've made so many cool tweaks, added some surprising new features and content, and of course squashed plenty of pesky bugs. This game just gets better by the day!
The latest beta update finally squared away the lingering changes we'd been on the fence about, and the beta testing phase is now winding down. However, we'd like to get just a few more players on board to give the tweaked game a going over with totally fresh eyes. What's Involved? We can learn a lot about how the game's working for people just by watching them play. All beta testers have to do is play the game as they naturally would for as long as they care to, and record it for us to see. Accompanying audio commentary is also extremely helpful, but we understand not everyone is comfortable doing that, so a written summary of any notable thoughts works fine. And that's pretty much it! Good help is so hard to find these days. If you're interested, please let us know here or on Discord!

It's been a long time since our last public update (psst, Discord gets weekly reports!), but we've been very hard at work! Rotund Rebound is near enough to completion that it's in the hands of external beta testers now, and we're confident in our Q1 2022 release schedule. We also may launch on PC first with consoles soon to follow, but we'll see. With this comes the exciting occasion of Steam Next Fest (Oct 1-7), in which Rotund Rebound is participating with a shiny new demo! And if you're interested in beta testing the full game yourself, letting us know what you think of the demo is a great way to be considered for the next wave of testers. At any rate we hope you'll check it out and enjoy it!

When we announced last October that we were gonna set Rotund Rebound aside to make Rotund Takeoff first, we apologized for the delay and hoped it wouldn't be too terrible a wait. Well, it was. RT development took longer than anticipated, which forced us from a 2020 to 2021 release window, and then porting to Nintendo Switch was a long struggle of unforeseen technical issues. Anyway, though it's taken waaay longer than expected, Rebound is once again our prime focus. So let's talk about where the project stands. First off, RR wasn't entirely dormant throughout the RT period. However, the full process of creating, launching, and watching people play RT, taught us a lot and inspired us to reevaluate RR. As a result, whatever bits of forward progress we'd made in those months were offset by the many tweaks and new additions that resulted.
We've talked about some of these changes on our Discord already. The biggest is the addition of a new support character, Meghan the bat. You'll find her near the beginning of each level, ready to assist. Call on her, and she'll turn the level's leaves into a set of Stars, which can be used to trigger her floating ability, or to take hits just like an energy bar. Stopped a moment too late and touched a spike? The spike pops instead of you, and you can keep going, as long as Meghan has Stars remaining. It's a whole new way to play, and will be a huge help for people who struggle with the precision movement, opening the game to a much wider audience.
If you're wondering about this new mechanic spoiling the gameplay for everyone else, worry not. We've completely reworked the system so that each level has three distinct types of Medals to earn. Clearing the level with Meghan's assistance earns you a Star Medal, but if you want the Clock or Leaf Medals, you'll have to play through again without her or while collecting all the leaves, respectively. Earning each Medal will require a different approach to the level (especially for speed-inclined players), and you'll have to snag all three to consider the level truly beaten.
These big changes had a cascade effect that trickled down through the entire game. One example is the tower keeper, Marvin, who now has various goals that give you options on how you proceed. As the images show, these changes are already up and running, and Rotund Rebound is so much stronger for them! The project is moving forward again, and--even with the ever-building realization that we're making a game the current market has little-to-no interest in--we're excited to be making something epic! And a good thing too, because the many facets of releasing Rotund Takeoff have given us a more realistic sense of how long this is still going to take. We're now looking at a probable Rotund Rebound release date of January-March of 2022. Sorry if that feels like forever away! It's possible we may get there sooner, but this feels like a realistic estimate given that we want the rest of the game's content to be as strong as what's already done, and that we're gonna want more extensive testplaying, and we'll hopefully be launching simultaneously across all intended platforms, and will still be promoting and updating Takeoff in the meantime. TL;DR Rebound is back on track, probably won't release until early 2022, but it's gonna be more worth the wait than ever! As always, thanks for sticking with us!

Our last announcement fell under the heading of cross promotion, so didn't show up on the main store page. In case you missed it, we wanted to let you know that Rotund Rebound is delayed, with a tentative release of 2021 Q2. The reason behind the delay is that we're going to be releasing Rotund Takeoff first, a remake of Rotund Rebound's prequel. Hop on over to its page if you'd like to give it a look.

As you may know, Rotund Rebound is a sequel to Chubbins (2014, Wii U). Since beginning Rotund Rebound's development, we knew we wanted to do a remake of Chubbins in the new style, new engine, and generally bring it up to modern Rotund-series standards. And for a myriad of reasons (starting with the fact that Chubbins is no longer available on the eShop), we've decided to do so now rather than later. Rotund Rebound is unfortunately delayed again as a result (now tentatively 2021 Q2), but the good news is that the Chubbins remake, titled Rotund Takeoff, has been in intense development for awhile now and is aiming to release before year's end! Check out the trailer now, or visit its Steam page for the full rundown! [previewyoutube=QF-VmYibeZ8;full][/previewyoutube] If you're a fan of the original, please be assured that even as we've made big upgrades and style changes, we've taken great care to remain faithful where possible. You'll be able to compare for yourself when a small Rotund Takeoff demo goes live on October 7th as part of the Steam Game Festival: Autumn Edition! And if you aren't interested in Takeoff and just want Rebound, we do apologize for the unexpected delay. Hopefully a few months longer won't be too terrible a wait. Let us know what you think, and don't forget to join us in the Rotund Discord for weekly dev reports and other exclusive goodies!

As an artistically inclined teen in the 90's, I was always dreaming up my own video game ideas and drawing characters and settings for them. When Mario Kart 64 came along, and other game series did their best to clone it, I'm sure I wasn't the only nerd to envision my own characters taking to the track in high speed 3D glory. 20+ years later, that dream has come true! Sort of.
Chubbit was not one of those old characters, and we have not made a kart racing game, but an old piece of fan art from the Miiverse days put the idea in our heads, and Rotund Rebound's mini-games seemed like the perfect place to bring the concept to life.
We weren't sure exactly what sort of racing mini-game to make at first. Then we hit on the idea of a Mode 7 inspired approach, and got really excited about the possibilities. We knew we had to make it work, and we did!
Kart mini-game aside, the past month's efforts have been split between advancing Rotund Rebound's development and trying to spread the word about it. The latter hasn't seen much success yet, but we're still trying. Participating in the Steam Game Festival was technically worth the time and effort put in, but only barely. We're hoping to get into a couple other curated events where we won't be lost among 900+ other games. We'll see if that goes anywhere. Anyway, just wanted to drop a quick update and share some fun pictures. For more frequent and in-depth reports, hop on into our Discord! -Paul

Rotund Rebound will be publicly playable for the first time ever in The Steam Game Festival, with a demo available only for the duration, June 16th - 22nd. As part of the event, we hope you'll stop by Discord to talk about the game and ask any questions you may have. https://discord.gg/Dt9rezQ We'll have a channel opened specially for the event on June 17th, but we also invite you to stick around for access to all channels and talking with fellow fans about the demo and sharing your progress. We also have a free game available exclusively to our Discord members!

Today begins an exciting new chapter for Rotund Rebound. We've got several big announcements to cover, so let's jump into it!

Going Official With New Media!

Rotund Rebound Is On Discord!

Rotund Zero Available Now!

In these dark times, a lot of game devs are showing their quality by joining in sales, holding special events, giving games away for free to those who could really use them right now, and so on. It's inspiring to see, and we'd like to join in the effort by... doing... uh, something. ... Yeah. When you're still developing what's essentially your debut title, there really isn't much to offer the world in its time of crisis. But if you're excited for or interested in Rotund Rebound and its corpulent critters, maybe an open and verbose update on how things are going will bring you a bit of joyful distraction. It's really all we have just now (and it's long overdue as it is), so here we go!

It has been a long time.

You probably guessed things are running a bit behind schedule. Will we be making that "Mid 2020" release date?

The good news about all this is we truly believe it will be worth the wait.

So, just how far along is the game now?

Thanks for sticking with us!

Earlier this year, after careful consideration and much deliberation, we selected March 20th, 2020. It felt good for our projected schedule and March was supposedly a good month for indies without many AAA releases. Shortly thereafter, Final Fantasy VII Remake and Animal Crossing New Horizons came along, two of 2020's biggest games, both announced for MarchACNH on the same day even. Not wanting to put consumers in the tight spot of having to pick between three epic titles, we decided to push our release date back. Joking aside, we obviously can't hope to compete for attention amid the likes of those giants. Our release date plans entered limbo as we reconsidered viable alternatives. And we're still in limbo, to be honest, but we're seeing it in a positive light. For a two-man team running themselves ragged, more time is never a bad thing as we continually improve upon our original vision for the game. We'll let you know once we've honed in on a new date.
Release delays aside, things are still progressing nicely. Recently we put the existing portion of the game into the hands of some advanced test players. Working with them has been a very interesting and involved process. Thanks to their feedback we've made a number of important tweaks and implemented new features that strengthen the game's experience in subtle but hugely satisfying ways. We look forward to sharing this refinement process through more in-depth dev blogs to come. In the meantime, be sure to check out the updated screenshots, Wishlist if you haven't yet, and all that good stuff. Thanks!